3 Jul 2024

I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few weeks revising the Hinksmans in Suffolk story in light of recent discoveries around William’s daughter Maria and the possible identification of his family in Twyford. It’s almost ready to circulate among the family.

Also, since March I have been undertaking a vast project to re-enter all of our family tree information into Gramps, which I last used back in 2013. In 2012, after a long hiatus I migrated over to Ancestry where I have been maintaining our main trees.

However, I’ve always been uncomfortable with having all that research locked away in a commercial system. Despite taking regular GEDCOM exports, I always felt that I didn’t really have control over our own data. Also the data quality in the tree on Ancestry leaves much to be desired, in particular the lack of a consistent place database.

In the past 10 years Gramps has improved immensely and I felt I could finally devote the time to reconstructing the trees. In the process I am taking local copies of all documentary evidence so I won’t lose access to it in the future and taking the opportunity to bring some consistency to my citations. Plus Gramps gives me full control over place names and adds a whole ton of flexibility.

Now, the trees on this site are generated from the Gramps database and I couldn’t be happier with the results. I can add narrative details and research notes to each person’s page, maintain a clean place hierarchy and add tons of little details such as mode of death or one-line bios.